Coda

SOREN KIERKEGAARD famously said: 

If someone lives in the midst of Christianity and enters, with knowledge of the true idea of God, the house of God, the house of the true God, and prays, but prays in untruth, and if someone lives in an idolatrous land but prays with all the passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting upon the image of an idol - where, then, is there more truth?  The one prays in truth to God although he is worshiping an idol the other prays in untruth to the true God and therefore in truth worshiping an idol.

The answer God gave Moses when he asked what he was to tell the People, the Children of Israel which god sent him to liberate them, that he was to tell them that "I Am" sent him, that God was I Am might be the most satisfactory and accurate identification of "the true idea of God" that there could be.  The Hebrew tradition, when you think about it deeply and without denominational glasses never fails to impress.

It is certainly related to the commandment against the making of graven images of God, even the pious abbreviation of the Hebrew name of God going to far in that direction for safety.

No matter what we do as soon as we settle on a human conception of God we are failing in the way Kierkegaard warned about.  

That's as much of an answer as I can give to your objection to that point.  Living in a largely media mythical evangelical "Christian" mono-culture America or a Roman Catholic one wouldn't do much to give us a God susceptible to academic methods, scientific ones are, by plan and design, incapable of dealing with God. 

The "Christian" America was only as Christian as it put the economic justice and social justice teachings of Jesus into practice and some of the greatest proponents of that have been non-Christians, Jews, Native Americans, Muslims, etc.  Christianity as an appendage of secular republicanism and secular democracy is more likely to miss that.  You get entirely closer in the doing of it than in the talking about it or proclaiming about it or believing about it.  I don't agree with the "faith alone" stuff, I agree with the Epistle of James on that.  As I said, Jesus said his Kingdom was not of this world, it's only present in so far as God's will is done and it's not going to be one by anyone but us creatures.   Anything else isn't something we have a say in.